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The Dayton Dust Bowl: Take It Out On The Help

If you are benefitting from a professional or technical contract with the state, your funding could be cut. Dayton says we can cut half of the $850 million we spend every two years on state contracts.

He may or may not have a point. But you’ll never know it from his budget plan.

State contracts are used for a variety of things including road and bridge design, computer consulting and even arts instruction at the Perpich Center for the Arts – basically, any skill that the state doesn’t usually keep on its inventory of elite uniononized employees.

Of course, Dayton doesn’t specify which half of state contractors we can live without. Because most of the contracting is for work that actually needs to get done, by a person who is qualified to do the job.

Need a big, high-traffic bridge built? The MNDOT doesn’t keep a big bridge design department on staff – because it’s not like the Dept. of Transportation is constantly building new bridges. You need a bridge designed and built? Hire a temp – or a “contractor”, as they’re called.

If the state needs to build a new website for vehicle tab info and renewals (hint hint), and they need to make it usable by a multiethnic, polylingual population? The State of Minnesota doesn’t employ User Experience Architects (that’s what I do), because they don’t need ’em every day; they contract ’em out.

Building a road? Remodeling a state building? Transferring data from an old database to a new one? Analyzing the market for a government service? Anything the state doesn’t normally do, day in, day out? They hire “temps”, contractors – construction workers, dry-wall contractors, database analysts, researchers – to do the job.

Democrats endorsed by government employee unions typically go after state contracts because they take jobs away from union members, not because we’re spending too much. Is Dayton planning to actually cut these contracts or does he want government employees to do the work instead?

The simple fact is, shifting contract work to state employees may very well cost more, not less. At the very least, it’s not a cut, merely a shift (unless Dayton, AFSCME, MAPE and the SEIU really think there are that many underutilized state employees out there…) blowing a $425 million hole in Dayton’s budget plan.

4 thoughts on “The Dayton Dust Bowl: Take It Out On The Help”

Having been a competitor in the states “outsourced services” game at one time, I will say that there is waste there. In fact, one Chicago based firm at teh time, was sucking up a couple million per year on the comp and expenses of some moron that didn’t do anything. Of course, since that is the norm within the state AFSCME cabal, it was never flagged.

“The simple fact is, shifting contract work to state employees may very well cost more, not less.”

It will _definitely_ cost more!

State budgets didn’t just start tightening this year. Squeezing something that has already been clamped down on (there have a couple, IIRC, “lengthening of the processes / complication of the rules / lowering of price thresholds” instances in recent years (make it painful to buy, people buy less)) probably won’t pay off big.

Making departments feel like they have to keep experts on the payroll for things they don’t often do? You don’t need a supercomputer to know that it will be more expensive. But Mark Dayton does.